Thursday, September 10, 2015

Weinman and Abbott on Eight Women Crime Writers: Provocative but not polemical

Sarah Weinman

Megan Abbott

Sarah Weinman had a good interlocutor for Wednesday's launch of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and the 1950s, newly out from the Library of America and edited by Weinman. Her questioner was Megan Abbott, and between them, they talked not just about the eight writers in the collection, but about the audience for those writers, about the world in which they wrote, about the reception for their work, about their equivocal place in the crime fiction canon, and about how the collection was put together. And they did it all without polemics.

Among the provocative notions that emerged: Abbott's suggestion that women may be better suited to writing noir than men because, while men believe that they can make a difference, and hence tend to write stories in which redemption plays a role, "I don't think any woman ever believes that." Now, a statement like that, broadcast in the wrong circles to the wrong people (the brainless kind), could obviously draw much flak.

Here, though, while Abbott's remark send a flurry of excitement through the audience (they packed the house at New York's Mysterious Bookshop), the idea served to stimulate discussion, to be revised, argued, and defended as necessary. That's what intelligent, interested people do, and it was a pleasure to spend a couple of hours among them.

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Sarah Weinman will talk aboutElisabeth Sanxay Holding, whose novel The Blank Wall is part of Eight Women Crime Writers, on a panel I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, N.C. The panel is called "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, and Macdonald," and happens Thursday, Oct. 8, at 2:30 p.m.

I wish Megan were on the panel, so I could ask her to explore the matter further. I suspect she meant something like what you suggested. In Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel The Blank Wall, which I just read and which is part of Eight Women Writers, the protagonist's main objective is accomplished by novel's end, but she her self is in exactly the same emotional place as she was at the beginning. To me, anyhow, that's what gives the novel its noir punch.

The title Women Crime Writers is of an interesting grammatical construction, by the way. I suspect most people would choose that title over WomAn Crime Writers, but adjectives do not generally decline my number: the red shoe, the red shoes.

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About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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